NEWS RELEASE

There are many ways a student can serve their community, and in the case of Janessa Weisbrodt, she chose to help the community she sees on a daily basis, her own school. A current student of Boyle County Day Treatment, Weisbrodt, was a transfer from Florida to Boyle County at the beginning of the 2022-23 school year. Although this was her first year in the Day Treatment program, Weisbrodt was chosen as the recipient of the Peter R. Marsh Foundation’s Silent Servant Scholarship Award because of her dedication to giving back to others in her community.

The primary purpose of the Peter R. Marsh Foundation’s Silent Servant Scholarship Award is to provide high school educators with a meaningful opportunity to utilize an in-school award presentation and the Award Recipient’s personal testimony to create a developmentally-receptive audience of student-peers in a “teachable moment” to learn behavioral empathy and community service opportunities from their educators.

The foundation uses the scholarship award to highlight students who exhibit empathy and compassion in their community, in the hopes that their example will encourage other students to follow their lead.

For her part, Weisbrodt has overcome many obstacles to be the successful student she is today. This transformation did not come easily, and it has only been through her hard work and dedication that she altered her perspective about her education and what she hopes to achieve throughout the course of her life. A large part of that transformation has been Weisbrodt’s discovery of her role as a leader in her school. Once she started being successful in her coursework, Weisbrodt began acting as a liaison between the student body and administration, bringing a fresh perspective to needs that could be addressed in different ways. She has also frequently addressed the student population encouraging them to make better choices and she continues to do this and as a result, some new procedures and rewards have been implemented in the Boyle County Day Treatment program. Weisbrodt has actively stepped up to become the first class president at BCDT. She has also started working with her peers, as a tutor in her downtime during her regular day, assisting students as they need it.

She also works around 38 hours a week at a local Dairy Queen, as she is self-supporting at this time. When she was in her family home, she was a frequent caregiver to the forty birds owned by her family members.

As for traditional volunteering opportunities, Weisbrodt assisted in the long-term neighborhood clean-up after a hurricane in her neighborhood in Florida in 2019. And she assisted with the Lil Cherubs consignment sale for Centenary Methodist Church in Danville. She is always looking for ways to help others, in her home, her community, and in the world at large.